The JC Archive Blog No.21 – Music in the Jewish Chronicle - The Jewish Chronicle

Looking through The Jewish Chronicle of September 1907, the word ‘tabernacle’ is mentioned several times. After all, Succot is coming up. Yet I did not expect to see Synogogue sheet music – a tune apparently sung in London synagogues as early as 1815 for Yigdal on the festival of Succot.

The author, Rabbi F.L. Cohen, first gives his opinion on the state of synagogue hymns of his time:

In considering some of our noble Hebrew melodies, one cannot help thinking of the lack of discretion with which the lower intellectual type of Chazan might introduce an air of secular origin into the synagogal service.

When we find older record of such tunes being employed in Jewish worship as those of which the original words were "Permetid Bella Amaryllis” “Les Filles de Tarascon" " Giulianita" "Die Schlacht von Pavia” “Papieweiss" or "Porque No Me Hablas", we are not surprised to hear in our own days of the Kaddish being sung to " La Marseillaise” “The Girl I Left Behind Me” or certain airs[sic] from the Italian operas.

Rabbi Cohen then goes on to talk about a specific tune, of which he doesn’t know the origin, and compares it to the tune he grew up with:

I cannot trace the particular source from which was taken the air for the Yigdal on the evenings of the Feast of Tabernacles now traditional in the English synagogues but it was obviously neither a Hebrew nor a sacred source. In the little country "Minyan" I attended as a child, we scrupulously followed “Minhag Duke's Place"; but it was not until later on when I worshipped at Duke’s Place itself, that the true inwardness of this melody burst upon me. The late Reverend M. Keizer had inherited it from his predecessors, and he positively rollicked in the chanting of this air, like any stage-mariner of the ‘Black-Eyed Susan’ era whence it had come.

The tune is not unknown on the continent, but it is particularly a festal intonation of the London use, and characteristic of the sense of tune and absence of discrimination of the London congregations of a century ago.

Here he tells us what has changed in the 100 years that had gone by – synagogues had become a place of reverence and decorum. They had become more English and more like churches.

It is certainly seemly to be festive on the Tabernacle evenings, " the season of our rejoicing," but they as certainly had not our present ideas of reverence and befitting expression of sacred joy, those good "Duke's Platzer" Hebrews of the Georgian era.

Next, he goes on to say where that old tune was next used.

So when Isaac Nathan (whose descendants still musically flourish, though outside the synagogue, here in Sydney, where I write) looked, in the year 1815, for a tune associated with Jewish worship to which he might fitly wed the verses, " The Wild Gazelle," in the series of words for " Hebrew Melodies " provided him by Lord Byron in that year, the hop, skip and a jump of the tune for "Yigdal" then sung in London on Succoth, at once suggested the combination shown in the transcription herewith. My readers must form their own conclusions as to whether, in this instance,

Music and sweet poetry agree

As well they should, the sister and the brother.

Finally, he brings us back to the present – 1907, and the current tune used by the Chazan of the Great Synagogue…

But the student will thank Nathan for his setting, because in the concluding part of it (not given here) he makes it clear that the practice of the present veteran Cantor of the Great Synagogue is no innovation, but that already in the London of Waterloo year the Chazan was accustomed to use a solemn contrasting theme for the line "Methim," whatever the height of gaiety maintained in chanting the other lines of the hymn "Yigdal."

And let us not leave the subject without a tribute to the cheerfulness of the Jewish spirit, that could even sing to a frolicsome tune the solemn metaphysic of the Maimonist creed.

And for all readers who are musically inclined, above is the sheet music for the tune used in 1815 for Yigdal – and for ‘The Wild Gazzelle’.

Rivka Goldblatt is a genealogist specialising in Jewish family history. Her website is www.jewishfamilyresearch.com

The JC Archive Blog No.21 – Music in the Jewish Chronicle

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